DataSynapse Launches VersaVision

I'm at the DataSynapse user event, Align 2007, today. I've had many interesting conversations with DataSynapse users and partners. I hope that some of them will allow me to share their stories with you. I've heard some pretty amazing success stories about how these organizations have created powerful pools of computing resources to address their need for reliable, scalable application services. While at the event, I had a chance to learn about, VersaVision, a new management tool the company has just launched. This product is designed to provide reporting and analysis of what's happening inside of a DataSynapse application virtualization environment. I thought you might be interested in learning more.Why now?

One of the bigger challenges with any form of virtualization is helping administrators understand what's happening. The environment is highly dynamic and things are changing from moment to moment. DataSynapse, with its partner Evident Software, developed a way to make the invisible details of a virtualized environment visible. As an aside, for those who don't remember, I published a post about Evident Software after speaking with the company's CEO back in June. That post can be found here.

DataSynapse, by the way, is demonstrating a strong focus on their core value by choosing to work with a partner rather than investing in developing their own expertise in the area of visualization and analysis of management data. This approach would also, of course, improve the overall time to market as well.

Product Highlights

DataSynapse's products gather volumes of data about running systems. This data is very granular. Making that mountain of raw data into concise, actionable information for an administrator is quite a challenge. Evident Software offers tools that can analyze and visualize management data. The two companies have put together a tool that makes it possible for an organization's IT staff to really understand:

• The capacity of their systems and how that capacity is being consumed by virtualized application services
• Help decision-makers know, based upon real data, whether their infrastructure is over or under provisioned
• Help decision-makers know what resources are available that could be allocated if needed
• Provide management information helping IT understand the true value of their IT investment

In DataSynapse's words, here are the key features of VersaVision:

• Provide a rich reporting infrastructure for DataSynapse GridServer environments.
• Deliver Built-in Grid Analytics, Out-of-the-box support for grid infrastructures, grid reporting.
• Deliver Service Level Management, Gain insight as to where and when services are failing to meed established Service Level Agreements. Entables IT to make near real-time capacity and infrastructure adjustments to remedy failing service levels.
• Achieve Active Capacity Planning, Make capacity decisions based upon business needs. Report on the activity demand and usage of the shared utility infrastructure (compute, data, network) as directly related to business applications or utility services, thus increasing business aguility and the ability to scale.
• Provide Chargeback Reporting, Design and manage business units into hierarchical relationships for chargeback reporting.

Snapshot Analysis

Here's a quick analysis of this announcement:

• Strengths - DataSynapse customers have long had the ability to learn a great deal about their virtualized infrastructure, how it was being used and could then make the best use of their resources. The tools DataSynapse provides with FabricServer and GridServer are very powerful but organizations required a knowledgable staff to turn mounds of raw data into something useful. VersaVision will make this process much, much easier.
• Weaknesses - This product is focused just on the DataSynapse environment. DataSynapse would respond that the reason that they partnered with Endeavors Technology was that Evident had a strong focus on managing virtualized environments and could help customers expand upon the foundation offered by VersaVision.
• Opportunities - Only a fairly small portion of the users of industry standard systems have chosen to deploy application virtualization products, such as FabricServer and GridServer. DataSynapse, along with competitors, have a great deal of opportunity to grow. Their key challenge has always been helping orgnaizations know that virtualization is more than virtual machine software, that forms of virtualization technology could be of great use to the organization and moving to a more virtualized environment doesn't have to be a painful process.
• Threats - DataSynapse faces quite a number of challengers in both application virtualization and management of virtualized environments. Few of them, however, offer the same mix of features, manageability and price.

Would having this type of information help your organization make better use of virtualized applications?